On Unemployment

Unemployment is a scary concept for most of us as we enter the workforce. Our employment is the means by which we survive, how we afford rent, food, clothes. Increasingly, one's job has grown to determine their living conditions. At the same time, a growing slice of the population within Canada and the US have sunk down to subsistence, living paycheck to paycheck.

Marx and Engels observed this phenomenon in 1847, simply put within the Communist Manifesto:

...a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.

Though industry, capital and society -- simply, the world in general -- has changed drastically since 1847, this observation still rings true today. We, the people, can't afford to be unemployed. Our jobs determine where we're able to live, what we're able to eat, if we're able to eat. AI burrows itself into our zeitgeist, this existential threat of unemployment looms over the population, the possibility of layoffs over the worker, and hiring freezes over the student.

Importantly, most people want to work. Work is how we serve our community and how we build a better tomorrow for the future of humanity. I believe it is what gives life it's meaning. I am eternally grateful for the work of the people around me, the people who came before me, and the next generation who will carry on after me. Steve Jobs, in his final email, expresses the same sentiment:

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

As jobs become scarcer, as AI fear-mongering fills our news feeds, and as cost-cutting becomes the new wall street trend, we, the workers, must ask ourselves:

Is there no work to be done?

Look around you. We have a housing shortage, healthcare shortage, roads full of potholes, decaying public infrastructure, polluted waters and rampant opioid addiction. There is plenty to fix, plenty of work to be done. What kind of world has work to be done, and no jobs?

Furthermore, how come the highest salaried, most sought after jobs are within lobbying, advertising, finance and weapons manufacturing? Is that the best allocation of talent that we can come up with?

Simply put, we live in a world where work is not performed for the benefit of society, but in the interest of profit. No society has even been built on these principals, and no society can continue to exist under these principals.

Both the American founding fathers, and the Soviet Bolsheviks, understood this deeply. The productive output of the people must benefit the people. As long as jobs are tied to profit, the work needed will not get done.